TITLE: The Air Fort of Nuvir NAME: Tekno Frannansa COUNTRY: UK EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com WEBPAGE: www.evilsuperbrain.com TOPIC: Fortress COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: tf_fort.jpg ZIPFILE: tf_fort.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows v3.1 TOOLS USED: POV-Ray editor MetaCreations Poser 3.0 for Windows RENDER TIME: 15 hours 11 minutes 14.0 seconds HARDWARE USED: PentiumIII 550MHz 256MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: It is a rare sight indeed. This unique vehicle is the flagship vessel for the nation of Nuvir, arguably the most politically powerful nation of this world. The flight of such a vast object is facilitated, as with most flying vehicles, by a load-stone in the centre of the fort. Obviously the load-stone in a vehicle of this size must be quite exceptional, and it is; The skill of Nuvian miners, along with Nuvir's rich mineral deposits, resulted in the mining of the largest single load-stone in existence, nearly 4 times larger than any other. The Nuvians brought the stone to Torace, the home of the most skilled engineers, and commissioned the building of the largest flying vehicle ever made. Today it returns to Torace, the country where it was created, for regular maintenance. On board are known to be Prince Henrick of the Nuvian royal family, accompanied by Lady Whitlow who is visiting The Fort from her home in Panjii. Also on board, as usual, are the mobile core of Nuvir's governing council, consisting of diplomats and special envoys selected to present to the world the benevolent public image the Nuvians desire. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is a really complicated image, so I won't try to explain it all here. I've provided the full source (apologies for it being a bit untidy), if you have a question about any specific effect feel free to e-mail it to me. Pretty soon I'll be putting some of the original sketches as well as a ludicrously high res render up on my website. The image (and indeed the story) is inspired primarily by role playing games. Particularly the Final Fantasy series, but also Skies of Arcadia and Lunar Silver Star Story Complete. Also various other influences contributed; Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, Disneyland, Japanese Anime (Laputa), and of course the real world inspired much of the scenery! Hopefully none of this has resulted in plagiarism :) I'll just briefly explain how I built the various elements of the image: The mountains, foothills, and coastline are heightfields. The ground and sea are concentric spheres (about 6000km radius in the scale of the image). The sky is another sphere, concentric to the ground, and the sky's colour is acheived with media (hence distant objects fading to blue). The clouds consist of 32 layers on some more spheres, so they dip realistically behind the horizon. The town, fortress, and ships are all straightforward CSG. The floating island is a julia fractal. The foreground hills are bicubic patches. The trees are created by the tomtree macro, though the shrubs are just spheres on sticks (I originally used maketree shrubs but they took forever to trace and at this distance you can't see the difference). And the man on the hill is a poser model (sorry), his robe is made out of julia fractals.